Pomegranate
by nottonyharrison
Summary: Then his mama tells him the myth of Persephone and Hades for the thousandth time, and he's left wondering if maybe Beth is Hades in this situation.
1. Chapter 1

She wants to fuck him.

She feels dirty and angry, but she wants to fuck him. From the moment he turned around in the warehouse when they first delivered the wrapping paper, his sleeves rolled up, lips open just that tiny bit, eyes running over her body, she's wanted to fuck him.

She notices the lack of tattoos on his forearms and gets curious about what's under that tightly buttoned shirt.

She wants to fuck him and she knows that he knows it. She sees it every time his eyes fall on her and slide from her toes to her eyes, and he licks his full, kissable lower lip.

Shit, she wants it so bad. Just the once. Just to say she tried screwing someone other than a middle class suburban car dealer and it's wasn't that great really.

She knows she's lying to herself.

...

He knows what he's doing to her. Every glance, every touch. Every rare but carefully chosen compliment.

He smiles at her, genuine and wide instead of his usual wry quirk. The first time is in her minivan, when she asks what to say to the FBI and he can't help himself. He can imagine what it would be like, not hard and fast, but intense and satisfying... with just a tinge of rage. When he tells her to say they're _making love_ it's sardonic and supposed to fluster her. She's speechless, and for a moment so is he, and the smile slips out. He leaves the car thinking about what he would do with his mouth, how he would take his time with every inch of her body until she was begging him to stop.

He hasn't felt like this before. This odd combination of lust and anger and ardent, hungry, desperate longing. He hates himself just a tiny bit for letting himself get worked into such a state, but he blames his abuela for feeding him telenovelas as a five year old, instead of making him watch Sesame Street and Slim Goodbody like all the other kids.

He told his mom about her. Not the specifics but that he'd met someone who made him so frustrated and enthralled all at once that he didn't know what to do. She had told him to take her to dinner, get her drunk on tequila and then go and sit on the roof of one of the abandoned warehouses with a couple of sleeping bags and a six pack to watch the sun come up. He had laughed and told her she wasn't that kind of woman.

Then his mama tells him the myth of Persephone and Hades for the thousandth time, and he's left wondering if maybe Beth is Hades in this situation.

...

She felt on _fire_ that day in the cafe, when he told her not to use the Botox on herself. First with anger and then a slow burn in the pit of her stomach until he had touched her arm as he left, leaving her flushed and squirming in her chair.

Shit, she wants to fuck him. She wants to use him and get him out of her system, and then go back to her normal boring suburban life. Maybe see if Annie can help her get a job at Fine and Frugal. Use the accounting degree she paid tens of thousands of dollars for.

She goes home and masturbates in the shower. It's unsatisfying, and her mind keeps drifting to memories of Dean and the fifteen years of phoning it in in the bedroom.

And only ever in the bedroom. Never in the bathroom, or the living room, or the back seat of one of the shitty cars he does such a crap job of selling.

She thinks about fucking Rio on the stairs, not making it to the bedroom and instead riding him as the carpet digs into his spine and she gets rug burn on her knees. She's angry at wasting her fantasy after she's already come, and files it away for later.

...

He realizes she's overreacted after he tells her to go home to her family, but he acts almost too late. They're planning a robbery when he walks into the house and tells Annie and Ruby to clear out. Annie is shaking, but Ruby stands her ground and tells him he's the one intruding. He looks at the ceiling and promises not to do anything to mess up their not so perfect lives, shows them he's not carrying, and makes himself comfortable on the couch.

Eventually they leave, and it's just the two of them. Beth stands awkwardly next to the television and asks him if he wants a drink, and he accepts. She pours two glasses of bourbon and spills a little as she's tipping the bottle back up to cap it. She can see her hands shaking and he feels a tinge of regret, out of character he realizes but then he's done so much since meeting her that he barely recognizes himself any sometimes.

Either that or he's starting to remember who he used to be.

He tells her he knows they're trying to put him away and that it isn't going to work, and she asks if this is when he kills her. He can see the fear and resignation in her eyes and he doesn't smile this time, wry or genuine. He just gets up and takes her hands, putting the two glasses in her hands back down on the table. He has second thoughts and puts one to his mouth, gulping it down even if just for the placebo effect, and tells her he would never do that. He isn't putting on the gravelly voice he often uses with her, instead it's almost a whisper of a promise, and he can see her shiver as he tangles a hand in her softly curled hair.

Her eyelids drop a little and he can see the fight in her eyes between fear and desire.

He knows the game he's been playing with her, but he lost track of the finish line somewhere along the way.

So he kisses her, and it's nothing like he imagined. He imagined she would be soft and pliable and let him lead, but instead she's hard and rough. She bites down on his lip and he makes a noise almost like a whimper, and she growls and tears her mouth away from his. She steps away and tops up his glass, watching him beneath her lashes. He accepts the challenge and takes the bottle from her hand and caps it, places it at the edge of the table, and shoves the glasses in the same direction.

She asks him if he wants to fuck her and he says no.

…

She made him whimper, and the sound makes her stomach flip. He whimpers and chases her lips when she pulls away and even after that he still says he doesn't want to fuck her.

His hands are telling a different story though, trailing down her sides until they're under her ass, lifting her up on to the table. He tells her then that he wants more, that he wants her to touch her everywhere until she's so desperate for him that she'll beg him to do anything. She tells him that sounds an awful lot like what he told her to tell Agent Turner all those weeks ago, and he says so what if it is.

When he kisses her again it's like he's trying to make sure she remembers it. He's slow and deliberate, and his lips are so soft that she can't help but suck one into her mouth and tease it for a moment with her tongue. That's the moment he gives up and presses his mouth to hers hard and demanding. He takes kisses from her like bites, his mouth is wet and lush and she gives it right back, hands wrapped around his neck and up behind his ears.

He lets her take control, and she tilts his head in a way she knows must be painful. He just makes that noise again, the one that goes straight to her gut, and she knows at that moment that she's a goner.


	2. Chapter 2

Rio think back to those telenovelas. He knows his skewed version of romance has been heavily influenced, and not by his dad who died when he was a toddler. Although his mama always says he was a romantic to the day he died, hands still clutching the tulips he'd bought a few minutes before at the Quick Stop.

He remembers watching the hero woo the heroine, the theatrics and the melodramatic storylines. He sees the parallels in his own life, even if it's through a fun house mirror.

He doesn't know if he's the hero in his story. He's pretty sure he's not.

…

Beth has for a long time believed her white suburban middle class sensibilities rendered her invisible. The well chosen but slightly dowdy clothing, the new yet functional mini-van. The large, but not ostentatious home with the beige siding and unremarkable yard.

She lived in the space between, comfortable enough to carry on, not so comfortable to be noticed. Except it turned out she wasn't really comfortable enough to carry on, and just comfortable enough to be noticed by the wrong people.

But then _wrong_ is a subjective term, right? What is wrong, when you're just existing?

Wrong is the feeling of Rio's rough tongue on her nipple. Wrong is the way she tugs on his shirt collar blindly, as she presses her crotch into his stomach.

Wrong is how she wants to hold her body against his all night, just _being._

…

It's wrong.

Its _wrong._

He tells himself it's wrong over and over until it's all just noise in his brain and his lips are on hers again pressing and biting and sharing.

He mumbles something about going to the bedroom, but she protests and a button on his shirt goes flying... and that's the point he stops caring. He kisses her until he can't feel any more and instead drifts off in a swell of warmth that makes his stomach drop and his brain shiver, until there's nothing but the instinct to make _her_ feel how much he wants to be like this forever.

He doesn't feel, he _wants._

…

She doesn't understand until the cold surface of the table touches her bare skin. His warm lips trail down her bare belly marred with stretch marks and a cesarean section scar, and she understands that he doesn't want her because it's forbidden or because of a desire to own her. She finally understands that she's a person with desires and complexity and he sees her for who she is, and not who she pretends to be. When his lips wrap around her, and his fingers press into her, she sees him. Not the young, dangerous criminal, but the hungry, generous man who has far more complexity than she's ever given him credit for.

And that's when she stops him. With his hand pressed hard into her, and his mouth making her shiver and her legs cramp, she grabs his head with both hands and stops him.

Her stomach tangles when his eyelashes flutter open. She can see his confusion and smiles, grabbing him by the collar and dragging him back to her mouth, and as she kisses him she tells him she wants to do this more than once, and asks if he does to.

He tells her he wants to do this forever.

…

He knows she's self conscious. She tries to hurry him along as he kisses her belly and presses his lips along the pale line above her pubic bone, but he insists. It's not until he feels her fluttering around his fingers, strangely silent in her pleasure that he realizes she's thinking too much.

And then his brain is telling himself to shut up but his mouth is telling her he never wants this to stop.

And that's it, he's done. He strips her of her last remaining clothes, tosses most of his own to the floor, and buries his face in her crotch. She tells him to slow down, that she's going to come, but he keeps going until she's shivering and her breath is heavy. She's so quiet but he knows it's from years of conditioning, so he lets her keep her silence until she comes hard and fast, her heel pressing into his shoulder and her hand clenching his forearm.

He thinks back to all the women he's fucked, from Debbie Ryan in twelfth grade, through to the girl he met at his auntie's house a month ago… Danielle. He's felt lust and desire and even at a few points he thought he was in love, but he's never understood what it was to be infatuated until this moment. With Beth's curvy, unpretentious body touching every inch of his, he wants nothing other than to be here.

He knows that's stupid. That this kind of obsession is going to be the end of him. He doesn't care, so he carries her to the bedroom. When he sees the bedspread he has a memory of calling her _bitch,_ and telling her Dean looked like a slimy asshole.

He wants to forget that day.

…

Beth finally gets the answer to her unasked question about the tattoos, and it's not what she was expecting. As she tugs off his open shirt, slowly and methodically, she uncovers miles of unmarred, tanned skin. No scars, no tattoos apart from a few blocked bars on the back of his arms. She asks him about the eagle and he tells her he got it when he was seventeen and stupid.

They don't fuck straight away. She's still coming down from the almost painful orgasm, and he kisses her and whispers to her until she's soft and pliable rather than taught and wound up. She can't remember the last time she felt this way, relaxed and warm and desired.

She doesn't know if she's ever felt that way. She knows it can't last, that winter will be over and when spring arrives along with the short hemlines and low cut tops that she'll lose his interest, but she'll take it while she can.

She tells him this, and he laughs. He doesn't answer so she takes it as an acknowledgment and and swallows her disappointment.

…

When Rio makes her come again, it's not what he expects. He expects her to flutter around him until she's shivering and spent, but instead it's almost perfunctory. He follows shortly after, inside her, and she heads to the bathroom moments later.

He can tell she's surprised when she returns to the bedroom after around ten minutes. The shower had run for a while, and her hair is damp and her eyes a little red. She asks him why he's still there, and his stomach drops. He asks her if she wants him to leave, and she tells him that if that's what he wants then that's fine. That it's okay he said those things, that hormones do stupid things to people's brains.

It's not what he wants. He wants to press his bare skin against hers, feel the flush of her pale body and the pulse of her heart. He wants to bury his lips in the soft skin of her neck and murmur that he loves her until she repeats it back.

He doesn't ever want to leave, and it's not until they're arguing, her in her robe and him covered only by a sheet in the bed where her husband used to fuck her that he tells her.

She makes his chest ache and his toes dig into the soles of his shoes. He doesn't tell her, he shouts it, more wounded than angry. She tells him he's an idiot and that he's too young to feel that way about someone with four kids and three mortgages. He laughs at her assumptions, and she tosses his shirt at him and tells him to get the fuck out.

And he tells her that she's an idiot. That he doesn't give a shit about age or kids, or that she's never even bothered to ask him how old he is.

He tells her that she's an idiot and she just stands there until he gets up and grabs her hand. He laces their fingers together and tells her he'll do anything for her.

She asks him for thirty percent.

He tells her anything.


End file.
